Dr Elsa Panciroli is a Scottish palaeontologist and biologist, who studies the early origins and evolution of mammals. She is an Associate Researcher at National Museums Scotland, a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and an EPA Cephalosporin Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford.

Her work centres on fossils she has helped discover during regular fieldwork on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. She has published scientific articles on subjects including mammals, reptiles, dinosaurs, fossil footprints, salamanders and the history of science, and has taught classes at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh on topics in evolutionary biology, zoology, palaeontology and scientific visualisation.

Elsa has written two books, both of which received praise in the press. Her debut, Beasts Before Us: The Untold Story of Mammal Origins and Evolution, (Bloomsbury Sigma, June 2021) was described in The New York Times as “smart, passionate and seditious”. Her “extraordinarily accessible and informative” second book, The Earth: A Biography of Life came out in 2022 (Quercus Greenfinch).

She is a graduate of the BBC Academy Expert Women training programme, and has appeared on radio, television and podcasts including BBC Crowdscience, The John Beatty Show, The Nine, and Our Lives. From 2016-2018 she was a regular paid contributor for the Guardian, and has also written articles for BBC Science Focus, Biological Sciences Review and The Scotsman, among other in-print and online magazines and journals.

She was a judge and co-organiser of the Hugh Miller Writing Competition, and co-edited an anthology of geological-themed writing, Conversations in Stone. She gives talks about science to people of all ages and backgrounds, including geological societies, schools and as an invited speaker at festivals, conferences and events, including New Scientist Live.

Her next book, Survival of the Unfittest, will be published by John Murray and Harper Wave in 2025

Imogen Willetts is a Creative Producer and University Lecturer.

She worked at the Royal Academy of Arts in London for eight years, where she led its cultural programmes of live events and festivals. This included leading the sell-out RA Lates series, after-hours gallery events that reimagined the nightlife behind iconic artistic movements, as well as an annual summer party that took inspiration from Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.

Imogen has an academic background in cultural and urban history.  She lectures at Kingston University’s School of Art and guest lectures at Central Saint Martins.

Her first book, Up All Night: A World History of Nightlife, will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK in 2025/6.

Oliver Milman is a British journalist and the environment correspondent at the Guardian. He lives in New York City.

His first book, The Insect Crisis, is a devastating account of how a silent collapse in worldwide insect populations is threatening everything from the birds in our skies to the food on our plates. It was published by Atlantic in 2022 and shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing.

Grace is represented by Sally in the UK on behalf of Zoë Pagnamenta at The Zoë Pagnamenta Agency. 

Larisa Brown has worked as a journalist for more than a decade, covering the Middle East region and wider issues on defence, security, diplomacy and politics. She is currently Defence Editor at The Times and also covers security and diplomacy for the Sunday Times. Her work has taken her to multiple conflict zones, including Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine and Libya and she was posted to Beirut, Lebanon for a short period in 2018. Larisa is a British Journalism Awards Campaign of the Year winner for her work highlighting the plight of Afghan interpreters.

She is currently working on her first book, The Gardener of Lashkar Gah, due to be published in September 2023.

Lucy Wooding is the Langford Fellow and Tutor in History at Lincoln College, Oxford. She taught at Queen’s University Belfast and King’s College London before coming to Oxford. Her research specialisms lie in the field of early modern British history, and she is particularly interested in the many different manifestations of religious culture in early modern England, from popular devotional traditions to the role of religion in political culture.

She is the author of Henry VIII (Routledge, 2009) and most recently Tudor England: A History (Yale, 2022). She is currently researching the relationship between liturgy and royal ritual in the Tudor period.’

Alan Murrin is an Irish writer based in Berlin. His novel in progress was shortlisted for the Peters Fraser Dunlop Queer Fiction Prize and was long-listed for the Caledonia New Novel Award 2022. In 2021 he was the winner of the Bournemouth Writing Prize for his short story “The Wake”, which went on to be shortlisted for short story of the year at the Irish Book Awards.

Alan is the recipient of an Irish Arts Council Agility Award and an Arts Council Literature Bursary. He is a graduate of the prose fiction masters at the University of East Anglia. His work was featured as part of the New Irish Writing series in the Irish Independent. He writes for The Irish Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The Spectator. His writing on art and photography has appeared in Art Review and The White Review.

Alan’s debut novel, The Coast Road, sold to Bloomsbury at auction, with further deals struck in the US (HarperVia at auction), Germany (pre-empted by DTV), and Italy (pre-empted by Mondadori).

Set in County Donegal in 1994, the year before divorce became legal in Ireland, The Coast Road tells the story of two women – Izzy Keaveney, a housewife, and Colette Crowley, a poet. Colette has left her husband and sons to pursue a relationship with a married man in Dublin. When she returns to the community to try and reclaim her old life, her husband Shaun, a successful businessman, denies her access to her children. The only way she can see them is with Izzy acting as a go-between. The friendship that develops between the two will ultimately lead to tragedy for one woman, and freedom for the other. This is a story about the limits that were placed on women’s lives in Ireland not so long ago, and the consequences they suffered for trying to seek independence. The writing is economical and evokes deep compassion for its heroines.

 

 

Photo courtesy of Adam Fearon